Pithy quote from slate.com

Posted on 2012/08/29 by treetrunkrick • Tagged chapter excerpt, happiness, history, humour, literature, mass media, satire, story • Leave a comment

From Alan Lightman’s intricate 1993 novel Einstein’s Dreams; set in Berne in 1905:

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

From:

“I’m Not Fighting or Battling Cancer—It’s Fighting Me.”
The “unpublished jottings” of Christopher Hitchens from his posthumous book, Mortality.
By Christopher Hitchens and David Plotz
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2012, at 2:13 PM ET

inspirational post of the day

Posted on 2012/08/27 by treetrunkrick • Tagged happiness, life coach, mass media, writing • Leave a comment

For those of you who write on a daily basis, here are some great suggestions for your journaling habits.

Don’t shoot the messenger

Posted on 2012/08/27 by treetrunkrick • Tagged barney fife, chapter excerpt, corrupt police officers, current-events, happiness, humour, mass media, politics, satire, sicilian mafia, story • 2 Comments

subtitled: Billy clubs, Batman and Barney Fife.

In his continuing effort to take guns off the street, Mayor Bloomberg today announced what the press has dubbed the “Barney Fife” rule — all officers on the street will be issued a single bullet, some getting a silver slug in case of vampires, werewolves, ghouls, zombies or other creatures that the masked crusaders cannot reach in time.

Officers who tend to shoot off at the mouth, if not their weapons, will receive what the press has drubbed the “Bobby sox” tool — a billy club, having their revolvers or other handguns turned in and melted to make a statue of the right, honourable mayor Hisself.

Further, Bloomberg issued an edict that a film, “The Dark Knight Rises,” and other mass media that encourages the large gathering of police officers for the sole purpose of firing on citizens, all of whom are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty, are banned from the bouroughs of New York City.

The NRA and the ACLU have banded together to protest these drastic moves by a man who believes he has the power of ~~God~~ Donald Trump.

The UN General-Secretary canceled the rest of his visit to the future site of the UN, Iran, to address this issue and calm the nerves of diplomats used to having police cover as they violate every law of common decency in the abuse of their diplomatic immunity throughout Manhattan and other areas of New York, especially its servants’ sectors of New Jersey and commuter bedroom communities of Connecticut.

The Police Benevolence Society has lit up every phone in the country, seeking funds to start a campaign to boot Bloomberg from office and put in a man who likes guns, shooting and dead thugs, necessarily in that order.

The Sicilian Mafia, Chinese Triad, Black Panthers, Real NY IRA and other alleged members of organised crime have called a truce while they consider the effects of these new announcements on their business of bribing corrupt police officers to look the other way as they intimidate and fill victims full of lead — maybe billy clubs and the threat of a single silver bullet are more efficient means of controlling their turf.

A stack of DVDs on the sofa, crickets chirping and hotrods burping outside

Posted on 2012/08/20 by treetrunkrick • Tagged celebrities, chapter excerpt, happiness, history, humour, mass media, satire, story • Leave a comment

While installing the “Complete New Yorker” on my old laptop PC, I performed a search for a recently-deceased comedienne. Some cartoon results:

Frank Modell, Dec. 13, 1969 — “No, we would not like to hear the same line as delivered by Phyllis Diller.” (Teacher, surrounded by children dressed for a Nativity play, to a little girl costumed as an angel.)

Whitney Darrow, Jr., Aug. 4, 1975 — “Guess what I dreamed last night. I dreamed I was at a dinner where Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Alan King, Flip Wilson, and Henny Youngman were roasting me.” (Woman talking to her husband as they eat breakfast.)

Other snippets:

Talk of the Town, James Lardner, Sept. 3, 1984 — “[Dr. Albert Lowry, “America’s most interviewed real-estate educator,” at the New York Penta Hotel] told about some of the deals he had made, one involving some property that he had bought from Phyllis Diller. He traced most of the financial failures of the real estate field to a tendency to forget the old maxim “Caveat emptor.” Dr. Lowry is the author of the best-seller “How You Can Become Financially Independent by Investing in Real Estate.” He offers further advice in a two-day seminar that costs $495. Many of those in the audience of the free lecture swarmed to the registration table with their checkbooks at the ready.”

Talk of the Town, William McKibben, Sept. 17, 1984: “…the Amazing Kreskin, a mentalist who has made nearly 300 appearances on the Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin & Johnny Carson shows. Phyllis Diller once called him ‘a male witch who should be burned at the stake.'”

Double Sided Sales Slip Customer Copy

Posted on 2012/08/18 by treetrunkrick • Tagged business, chapter excerpt, climate change, culture, current-events, detrimental effects, economy, education, environment, food, global economy, government, happiness, health, history, humour, mass media, meaningless term, military, nature, politics, public businesses, religion, satire, space, story, technology • Leave a comment

A couple of kids protesting in a church on the other side of the planet taught me that if you want to play with fire, be prepared for the consequences.

A musician who’s part of a corporatised musical group playing officially-sanctioned anti-corporate lyrics taught me that hypocrisy knows no cultural bounds.

You see, I’m all about the power of the people.

But keep in mind that my goal is to move the wealth of many thousands of millionaires and billionaires out of reach of the people.

The “people,” of course, is a meaningless term that can be used positively or derogatorily: “We the people…” or “you people,” and its many forms used to provoke crowds in time for [re]election.

The people get used a lot, don’t they/we?

Keep people distracted while we prepare…

Well, I’m not supposed to tell you what’s being prepared, am I, if I am to maintain this storyline?

Let’s imagine a few possible futures:

It’s clear that changing the habits of billions of people to save themselves from themselves is not going to happen when so much profit is at stake, including just good enough profit to feed the mouths of billions of people. If you had the opportunity, would you set up a location for your friends and family that is safe from invasion by non-heavily armed people and sufficient to provide you a livable subculture/ecosystem while the rest of the world was experiencing major/negative climate change?
You have great wealth at your disposal and you believe that the global economy is your friend so you spend your billions of dollars trying to improve local economies which, in turn, improve the global economy, increasing not only your chance for survival but the whole world’s, too.
You and your friends in private and public businesses have been testing the theory that living off-world is a sure way to hedge your bets about Earth’s climate change and any detrimental effects it may have on your way of life. You encourage the use of public funds to affirm your theory while you amass the resources you need to build off-world colonies.
Your family has lived in relative poverty for generations. You have competed against your peers and created a small empire — it’s time to enjoy the fruits of your labour, cost no object in pursuing a life of luxury.
Your family has lived in the peace and comfort of middle-class living for generations — no reason for you to change the course of history.
Poverty means nothing in your subsistence lifestyle. Words like “blog” and “computer” do not exist in your language full of nature-based terminology.

All of us are familiar with these scenarios, through personal experience, from someone we know or by popular culture references.

In telling the story of our species in relation to the humongous universe in which we barely understand we live, tying these subplots together is interesting some days and boring on other days.

However, it’s all I have to work with here.

Like going from static cartoon strips to creating animated daily cartoons in writing, if not drawing.

Protestors with machetes will most often lose to security guards with guns, who will always, always, always claim self-defense after discharging their weapons and killing protestors.

My question is this: if the commander in-chief claims credit for killing a notorious villain, does he also take credit for the most number of military suicides of any commander in-chief during his time in office? If your military has some of the lowest morale on record, then I, in honouring my father’s legacy, have to ask myself why anyone with a military background would vote for you? Following that train of thought, how many of us benefit from one of the largest peacetime (sorry, I mean “war on terror”) military deployments in history — should we also question re-electing the commander in-chief? In this case, the Law of Unintended Consequences meets the Law of Diminishing Returns. What am I missing here? What am I not telling the reader? I am not my father so why is there not a viable third candidate for me to elect?

Ahh…the balance of power. ‘Tis a game that entertains, n’est pas? Sarkozy and Berlusconi quickly become footnotes in history. Merkel, like Kohl, is not far behind. Anyone remember Mikhail Gorbachev or Deng Xiaoping? Did Greece used to be a country?

It will be no different on the Moon or Mars. More pioneers, more forgotten history as we scramble to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves from the elements while armchair bystanders question our motives and protest our version of progress that clashes with theirs.

Remember the Golden Rule: S/he with the most power protecting a stash of gold makes the rules.

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands…

Posted on 2012/08/17 by treetrunkrick • Tagged chapter excerpt, film, government, happiness, history, humour, literature, mass media, meditation, military, music, satire, story • Leave a comment

If you are a salmon swimming upstream, a grizzly bear tries to take a bite out of you, you slip out of its mouth and die before spawning, would you think your life had any meaning as your body parts decompose and feed multiple non-bear lifecycles?

What about the soldier who committed suicide before reproducing himself?

Or the young girl ridiculed at school who steps in front of a subway train?

Or the farmer who died of a heart attack in the field with ten children to feed?

What about a planet full of fossils but no living beings at this time?

In other words, do we have to give meaning to or put everything in context with our current civilisation?

I have added seven more books to my collection, books which belonged to my father and my great-uncle:

The Armored Forces of the United States Army, (c) MCMXLIII by Rand McNally, foreword by Brigadier General David G. Barr, General Staff Corps
The Coast Artillery Corps of the United States Army, (c) MCMXLIII by Rand McNally, foreword by Major General J. A. Green, President, U.S. Coast Artillery Association
Recruit Handbook, published and distributed for recruits at the Naval Training Center, San Diego, California, 1941 (?), owned by G.T. Green 567-70-46, a word of welcome by R. S. Haggart, Commodore, U.S. Navy Center Commander
Mathematics, Volume 1, Basic Navy Training Courses, NAVPERS 10069-A, published by United States Government Printing Office: 1951, owned by Porter (rank unknown)
Watch Officer’s Guide, by Captain Russell Willson, United States Navy, published by United States Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland, 1941
Same as above, formerly owned by Ensign Paul F. Glynn, given to my father
The Bluejackets’ Manual, United States Navy, 1940, Tenth Edition, published by United States Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland, 1940

Everywhere I turn in research of my father’s material, I find war memorabilia.

My father never let WWII out of his thoughts. Further, his Army service during the Cold War gave him fluency in the German language as well as a group of lifelong friends.

My father read spy novels and enjoyed watching John Wayne movies, which reminded him of his youth, going to the theatre on Saturday to watch serialised cowboy movies.

Soon, I will run out of Dad’s material to rummage through.

Then, I will have my mother to spend more time with.

I will not worry about dangling modifiers or prepositional phrases that my father, a professor of 20+ years, taught me to pay attention to.

Days spent with my father are as gone as living beings that became fossils on another planet, with no one to tell their tale.

I only have this moment to call my own.

My nieces and nephews will have a few memories of their uncle that became part of their narratives they pass on now and in the future.

Every day, I gain a bit of wisdom, creating an insight from my observations.

What have I gained from today?

My grandfather and his brother in-law (my great-uncle) both served in the U.S. Navy during WWII — the former remaining a career sailor, the latter returning to civilian life as a U.S. Postal Inspector.

My father, a youth at that time, had plenty of heroes to call his own — war heroes, film heroes — because he was, in part, making up for the lack of his biological father.

In my youth, who were my heroes? Richard Nixon and his staff, my father, my Scout leaders, some of my teachers, actors who played James Bond, Euell Gibbons, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Rodale, Red Skelton, and others.

I didn’t have any war heroes. The Vietnam War was not the type of engagement that the mass media used to create heroes for kids. We learned about heroes of other wars like George Washington, Sergeant York and General Patton. We watched protest marches and heard about European terrorist groups like the Red Brigade and American criminals like the Symbionese Liberation Army.

The battle for my set of thoughts was fought not in terms of Axis vs. Allies but cocaine-filled discotheques fueled by bands like the Bee Gees and Donna Summer vs. Boy Scout campfire songs and summer church camp singalongs.

The clash of subcultures continues unabated.

In 1,000 years, the fossilised remains of today’s subcultures will be studied for the minute traces of continuity between one time period and another. Genealogical institutes will try to connect heroes of the past to common people wanting a feeling of blood-related significance.

The cycles go on and on.

What kinds of songs are we teaching our children? Singalong songs that were the pop culture tunes of their day or modern songs that reflect the tastes of today?

More importantly, are we creating heroes that our children will continue to admire in their senior years, long after we’re gone?

Do we have to have heroes to give meaning to our lives?

Do we have to have children to leave a legacy and/or do we have to leave a legacy at all, knowing we’re always part of the multiple lifecycles of the universe?

The Menace From Beyond The Grave Situation

Posted on 2012/07/12 by treetrunkrick • Tagged academics, american bible society, book, business, chapter excerpt, current-events, education, government, government printing office, happiness, health, humour, laser printer cartridge, literature, mass media, medicine, military, new rochelle ny, politics, reading, religion, satire, science, story, teaching, technology, transportation • Leave a comment

While we set our supercomputers to analyse processes that heat our CPUs surreptitiously, we give you another list of books added recently to our old-fashioned library of paper-and-ink products:

Facts on Aviation For The Future Flyers Of Tennessee, (c) 1944 Tennessee Bureau of Aeronautics, Nashville, Tennessee
Submarine! The Story of Undersea Fighters, by Kendall Banning, illustrated by Charles Rosner, (c) 1942 by Artists and Writers Guild, Inc., printed in the United States of America
The First Book of Moses called Genesis, translated out of the original Hebrew and with the former translations currently compared and revised, set forth in 1911 and commonly known as the King James version, pocket edition by American Bible Society (instituted in the year 1816), New York
Stamp collecting book by Richard Hill, Sunset Trail, Knoxville 18, Tennessee, manufactured by U.S. Government Printing Office
History of America, by Carl Russell Fish, Professor of American History, University of Wisconsin, illustrations by Leon D’Emo and Will Crawford, (c) 1925, 1928 by American Book Company, Made in U.S.A., owned by Ralph Eldridge, Knoxville Central High School senior 1932
The Kingsport Strike, by Sylvester Petro, (c) January 1967, Arlington House, New Rochelle, NY
International Atlas and Gazetteer of the World, containing a new and complete Descriptive Gazetteer of the Principal Countries of the World together with a complete collection of up-to-date Political Maps of the World, Statististical [sic] Tables, Census Figures, Air Line Distances, etc., (c) 1935 by C.S. Hammond & Co., Inc., Map Engravers, Printers and Publishers since 1900

Meanwhile, our staff in the Department of Dastardly Deeds has developed a potential storyline for us to follow:

By experimenting with chemical formulae, scientists have perfected the ideal poison letter. Soon, they will infiltrate the labs of laser printer cartridge manufacturers, change the ingredients of the cartridge contents and release the newest formula into the homes, factories, offices, Internet cafes, construction trailers and libraries of the world.

Then, when the time is right, they will activate the signal that tells the cartridges to print a special circuit on paper.

The circuit, combined with the special ink that, after being heated and fused to the paper, uses the release of heat as the paper cools to send a strong enough “charge” to a blob of ink in one corner of the paper to achieve a minor goal of the Department of Dastardly Deeds.

The scientists have asked us not to reveal their goal at this time.

We won’t, because we have to figure out if their goal aligns with our major milestones before we decide to increase or eliminate their department budget.

While that’s going on, we’ll let you know that the brain circuit reconfiguration we’re testing on Jesse Jackson, Jr., may work this time. We have tried similar experiments on other members in the public eye (refrain from referring to our previous work as “lobotomy,” electroshock treatment, drug cocktail service, etc.), in order to keep them in line with our milestones.

Those who haven’t stayed on message have been moved aside (again, refrain from referring to our previous work as “failing the newspaper test,” “assassination,” “drug overdose,” suicide, not seeking reelection, retiring unexpectedly, etc.).

Managing a planet is distracting, we admit, but, on days when we’re bored, it provides an entertaining respite from looking back at this time period 1000 years in the future while trying to live a fulfilling life 1000 years from now, too.